Summary: Medical Educator authors marched in 2007 to support the rights of junior doctors and to protest about what became known as the MTAS fiasco. "A bungled reform a day keeps the Junior doctors away" was the verdict form the Telegraph newspaper. But what was behind the story of MMC (the Modernisation of Medical Careers), who were the individuals involved in supporting the rights of those doctors, and what is the state of play now, nearly 2 years on from doctors marching through the streets of London. A representative of RemedyUK (http://remedyuk.org/), the key organisation behind the junior doctor movement speaks to Medical Educator. Dr Marks is a Consultant Anaesthetist, former training programme director, and spokesperson fro Remedy UK. Here he speaks to James Bateman, from Medical Educator. Thanks for speaking to us Richard. You got involved with RemedyUK after you were disappointed with how the Government had handled the MTAS situation? Yes, RemedyUK started in November 2006 and I joined it in January 2007. Of the key 6 people who started it, I was the last one in..... When I came in I had spent the whole of 2006 trying to get our local training rotations to work under MMC [modernising medical careers], but I simply couldn't make it work. The recruitment system looked like it was just going to be a big mess. I was feeling despondent, but then I went to a meeting of RemedyUK. They were planning a protest march, and I thought, if anyone's going to sort it, then these guys will. I think the march had a very large impact on doctors at the time. The vast majority of junior doctors in the UK were either aware of the march in 2007 about MTAS (Medical Training Application Service), or on it. Do you think the campaign has reached medical students? Not really. We have medical students in the hospital that I work at. I don't think that most of them are aware of what the problems are. We tended to agree from our own experiences of contacts with students. We then asked Dr Marks to tell us a little about the current legal campaign. He highlighted the background to the MTAS enquiry following the march in 2007. He went on to describe the potential problems with dealing with a regulatory body (the GMC) and the existing organisation the BMA (British Medical Association) who had been perceived by many junior doctors to be less vocal in the defence of its members. He went on to say: MTAS was technically just a computer system but it was the whole application process around the recruitment which was the disaster. The BMA had called for it to be stopped, but didn't really do much more than that. There was then some legal proceedings between thee two organisations which we will not cover in any more detail here. Dr Marks also commented: The bad thing was that for the first time run-through training was being offered, which meant that the stakes for getting or not getting a job were higher than ever before. Dr Marks makes a point here that resonates with colleagues who are junior doctors: the failure to get onto a training programme was almost seen as a "one shot" approach: failure meant that you were then destined to pursue a different speciality. The process by which you would get or not get a job seemed to be less fair, and there were a lot of issues around the recruitment process. We thought it should never have been allowed to happen. This is echoed by the grass roots support of RemedyUK by junior doctors. Want to see for yourself? Ask a doctor that you work or train with! Dr Marks then highlighted a series of reviews that cast a damning verdict on the MTAS process. Read more about them here, or listen to the podcast. The summary of the verdicts was as follows... All the independent reviews said in various ways that was a complete disaster. The role of the regulatory body for doctors in the UK, the GMC, was then discussed. What we (RemedyUK) then thought was, why hasn't the GMC taken a view on this? On two grounds...
